Rushing the Cherokee Strip

I

WITH the passing of the frontier, pioneering degenerated into mad scrambles for lands taken from the various Indian reservations. But after the experiences at the opening of the Cherokee Strip, in September 1893, the government had to put an end to these land rushes en masse at a given signal. Giving away reservation plums at a tenth of their value incited to murder; and murder, as a means of deciding who should win the prizes, fell into disrepute. Thereupon the government went into the lottery business, raffling off subsequent offerings of Indians’ lands by the drawing of numbers in envelopes from a big box.

The Cherokee Strip — more correctly, the Cherokee Outlet — was a stretch of prairie country about sixty miles wide, extending for two hundred miles along the north line of the Indian Territory. North of it was Kansas; south, the four-year-old Territory of Oklahoma. Its great extent, and its location next to settled country, drew the biggest crowd of adventurers ever gathered for the single purpose of collecting a farm from the government. There were also a few farmers present.

I went over from Nebraska to join the excitement. And of all the land booms this last of its kind was the wildest, most tragic, and most ridiculous.

The Cherokees were originally a powerful Indian nation in Georgia. Successive treaties had cut their lands to what they considered an irreducible minimum. They might have hung to this minimum for some time had not gold been found on their reservation; this shortened the story of the Cherokees in Georgia with a bang. They were ejected by a strong military force and led seven hundred miles through the wilds to the Indian Territory. Four thousand out of fourteen thousand died on the way.

Horrible? No worse, this exile of the Cherokees, than that of some other Indian tribes to ‘the Dump,’ except that there were more of the Cherokees to make a showing in the death total.

From their reservation in the Indian Territory, the Cherokees were granted a ‘perpetual outlet west’ to the great buffalo plains running up the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Hence the name for this long tract, ‘the Cherokee Outlet.’ Successive treaties, again, had cut down their holdings in the Indian Territory. The last to go was this Outlet; now it was to be rushed for on the crack of a gun at twelve o’clock noon, Saturday, September 16, 1893.

The rush was to be made from a lineup on both the Kansas and the Oklahoma boundaries. I chose the Kansas State line, since two of my brothers, land men like myself, were living within twenty miles of the Cherokee border. At this point a railroad crossed the Strip, running southward to Oklahoma and Texas. My older brother and I, being landowners and therefore ineligible as homesteaders, were to make the run solely for the fun of it; and, to get an extra kick out of the experience, we were going in on bicycles. I might anticipate by saying that we added novelty to the spectacle. Every other conveyance then known to man was in that race, but no bicycles except ours.

A week before the opening, we were exercising our steel bronchos along the Cherokee border. Thousands of boomers were already there, but arrivals just before twelve o’clock on the chosen Saturday would have the same chance in the rush. Yet most of these had been squatting here for a month or more — members of that vast fraternity who spend a good part of their lives aimlessly waiting for something to turn up. A prairie-schooner crowd, largely, camped next to their tented wagons with their pots and pans and open fires, wherever space offered along the edges of the Kansas farms.

Did the farm owners object? Not many, if any. They were having a brisk local market for all their produce, from pigs and chickens to corn and oats. Objection might not have been effective anyway, with the southern borders of their farms virtually appropriated by the motley crowd waiting for the big run.

It was a hundred in the shade, with no shade, and the south wind everlastingly blowing during the day, bowling the heat along on a steady run from Texas to Canada, burning every green thing on the way.

North of the boomers were the cultivated farms and tree-sheltered homes of Kansas. At their feet was the promised land of untouched prairie; not a tree, not a building, nothing but the dried grass of a dry September, stretching as far south and east and west as they could see. Rich land, waiting for them at a dollar and a half per acre, and worth twenty — but they were not to enter until the crack of the soldiers’ rifles out front gave them the signal to go.

The new country had been surveyed in the usual way: four little holes at mile corners, with a small mound between them bearing the notched stone from which the land numbers could be read by those who knew how to do it. There were the half-mile marks, too, pointing east-west, or north-south, to send the boomer on the run to his mile corner, where he was supposed to stake a little flag marked with his name and land number, to notify all comers that that quarter section had been taken.

This is the procedure: at the signal gun, Mr. Boomer starts on the fly — on a wise little prairie mustang if he has good sense, or anything else from a race horse to a prairie schooner if he has n’t — and keeps going until he thinks he is well clear of all others still running; then he and his partner — they should run in pairs, to witness each other’s time of staking claim — veer away from each other about a half mile, so as not to stake the same quarter section, jump off their conveyances, stick their flags, and note the time. The marking at the mile corner is then to be done as soon as possible; but that first setting up of the flag is the legal time of entry.

A pretty plan, neatly worked out in advance on paper; but in the confusion of a wild race partners cannot always stick together, and several others may be staking the same claims just over the brows of as many little hills.

II

Days before the run, matters began to look ominous. Already there were twice as many waiting boomers as waiting farms — and heaven knew what the proportion would be on the day of the rush. The idea was penetrating the deluded crowd that this was to be a race — not a prairieschooner parade to a happy new home. Moreover, four sections in each township of thirty-six — one claim in every nine — were reserved for educational and state purposes. Thus one man cut of every nine who might succeed in staking a claim ahead of the crowd was bound to find himself on reserved land. By the time he could look up his land numbers at the mile corner, his chance of going on and getting another claim would be nil.

With a faint comprehending of the difficulties, there came the temptation to sneak into the Strip at night ahead of the run, choose a good piece of land, hide on it, and be there with the proper markings when the boomers came tearing along. In the confusion, one could quietly emerge from long grass, or a hole in the ground, with not much chance of getting caught at the trick.

It looked easy, and it was easy. Under cover of darkness, more and more were slipping across the line. These too-previous gentry were known as ‘sooners.’ The soldier patrol was supposed to put them out; but the usual penalty for sooners caught in the act by boomers after the opening was sudden death.

The patrolling of the Strip by soldiers was totally inadequate. So the bright minds in Washington who were engineering the project from afar got up a scheme for beating the sooners. Everybody must register before the run, said they, and have a sealed certificate with his signature attached, to make his claim good when he came to prove up at the Land Office. Notaries were posted all along the line delivering the certificates; everybody lined up and got one. The poor fellows already in had none. It was a clever turn — on those already in the Strip; but during those last few nights sooners, twenty now to one before, flocked across the border, armed with the certificates. Anybody versed even a little bit in the ways of the Western land boomer would have withheld these tokens until the morning of the run.

But every new complication added to the excitement, and this one boomed business for the soldier patrol. Many a soldier, on discovering a hidden sooner, found himself susceptible to the touch of a ten-dollar bill; then he would inform a comrade in arms, who also would drop around on the hiding man; and so on, between friends, until the sooner’s money was exhausted. The last soldier, getting nothing, would virtuously escort the depleted sooner out to his officer on the border, and receive credit for the act — not much as compared to a ‘ten spot,’ but better than nothing at all.

Meanwhile, the crowd on the border grew — and it grew distinctly tougher. The very notion of standing on land worth thirty dollars an acre, with one’s toes touching land to be handed over to the quickest man at one-fifty per acre, was tempting to men of the quick kind. We were now getting men in decided contrast to the inarticulate, prairie-schooner crowd; men ranging all the way from mounted gun toters off the ranges to city sports with fast horses hitched to buckboards. Most of the fancy horses were to fail. It takes a prairie-bred horse to dodge badger holes and gopher mounds and hit the bunch grass with a sure foot.

Speed, anyway, was only a single item in this peculiar race; the consistent winners were to be men off the ranges with good mounts and plenty of gun bluff to clear off those who had arrived ahead of them. The race might be to the swift, but the land was going to the tough.

III

Finally the eventful morning broke. A day exactly like all the rest — hot, dry, a south wind rising with the sun. Dead ahead, a hot prairie wilderness where there was not a well, scarcely a stream not gone to a dry bed, and but an occasional water tank on the one railroad running south to Texas. This water would be available only for the comparatively few who could stake their claims near by.

Naturally there was a wild eagerness to make the run next to this railroad; not only because of its water tanks in a waterless country, but to get land near it, and also for a chance at the town lots in the several sites which had been laid out near the tank stations.

A boomer could take a farm or a town lot — but not both.

So at this point in the waiting line we had an immense number of ‘town siters’ added to the land seekers. For their special accommodation a train of ten cattle cars was to be run, stopping for a moment at each town site. Its engine toed the starting line along with all the rest of us, with steam up and loaded to the cowcatcher with a human swarm, waiting for the crack of the gun at twelve o’clock noon.

The train was to run not faster than eight miles an hour, so as to give no advantage over the horsemen; but a flock of one-dollar bills fluttering around the engine warped the trainmen’s judgment, and they ran it fifteen. Another fight provoker, this, in the already hectic scrap for land.

As we walked down to the starting line that morning, coatless, of course, and pushing our bicycles, — there was too much of a crowd to ride, — I happened to be just ahead of my brother and a deputy sheriff, a friend of his. The deputy was telling of the valiant but futile efforts to disarm the boomers while they were in the law-abiding State of Kansas, and thus cut down the inevitable shooting in the Strip. Only a few hundred guns had been collected, he said.

‘ Probably,’ he remarked sadly, ‘ there are guns on most of the men all around us.’

Suddenly I happened to think that the barrel of my good old Smith and Wesson hammerless was at that moment sticking out at least an inch and a half from my hip pocket. I was carrying five hundred dollars cash in a money belt, to be ready for any possible business turn in the Strip, and I felt the need of protection. Without undue haste, but quite soon, I slipped around behind that deputy sheriff.

Equipment for the run had to include water as the first essential; then food for several days — or for a day only, if one were going to a town site — and a blanket to roll up in on the prairie at night. Those with wheeled vehicles could be more generous in carrying oats, but neither they nor the horseback riders could hope to run the race if carrying any water at all for their horses. In any event, the horses took a long chance for their lives in this merry race.

This crowd of the final morning was as like the pastoral collection of a week before as a political convention is like a Sunday-school picnic. If, a week before, there had been two boomers to every claim, twenty had gathered now. A simple calculation showed that south of every mile of line there were a hundred and twentyfive claims available, or one for every claimant if they had been standing forty feet apart. Here, with all kinds of conveyances ranged four to seven tiers deep, they must have averaged about a man to the foot. Not as bad elsewhere, but nowhere were there anything like enough claims to go round.

As my brother and I were strolling along the line we came upon a friend of his, gazing down at the ground with blood in his eye.

‘Somebody will get this land,’ he muttered, kicking the dust with his foot. ‘Why not I?’ At the crack of the rifle, he was going to stick his flag right there in front of his feet. Would we two stand by, and bear witness for him that he was the first man to claim this quarter section?

We glanced at each other, and winked. We had n’t been born yesterday in the land game.

Carefully we explained that ours was a pleasure party exclusively, — we did n’t want anything on our minds to mar the serenity, — and besides, how about the eight hundred and sixty-four men with blood in their eye now digging their toes into the half-mile front of this same pretty farm? No, — sorry, — but we still had a craving for life, such as it was.

But this raised interesting questions about what was to happen after twelve o’clock noon, in this most stupendous race ever run. I sat down on a little knoll just behind the line and viewed the prospect — calmly, not having any fevered ideas about the government owing me a farm.

First, about that man with blood in his eye. Who would get that farm — and the hundreds of other farms like it, lying in the first row against the border? And the next row of farms, a half mile out? Or the next — and next? Or any within, say, the first five miles?

The whole jam would be going over them practically at once. Ten, or a hundred, — or none, — might drop the flag on any one of these near-by claims; swearing to the time would mean nothing, with country watches running minutes apart, where it was to be a matter of seconds. Then what earthly judge could decide which got to any claim first?

Why try to get there first, if it could n’t be done? Why not drop off and stick a flag anywhere, then fight it out with perhaps a dozen others who had done the same thing on the same quarter section?

As clear as daylight, — or, to use a more apt Western term, as ‘sure as shootin’,’ — getting a farm anywhere within that first five miles was to be a matter of bluff, or buying off, with the chances in favor of the nerviest man. Beyond ten miles, most settlements would be arranged by just plain ‘shootin’ past the ears.’

Then I took to picking winners — an engaging pastime at any race.

About those two-wheeled racing gigs, and the sports with the buckboards, and the fastest horses: these men could never have ridden in a gig, or a springy rig, over any kind of prairie without knowing that speed would very soon toss them into the air. A slow trot is the best that can be done over raw prairie. Then why the fast horses, even if they should happen to miss the prairie holes? Few winners in that lot.

Those range men on their prairie mounts, swinging easily into the front line: it is past eleven now; they will not ride fast — they never do. Among them are some not so good at riding anyway — merely tough chaps, engaged in keeping out of jail. But they all have prairie mounts, and they all will ride sure. No hurry. They are taking this afternoon ride, not to win a race, but to get land by the gun route. Most of them will get it — if they don’t have a falling out and try to get each other.

The prairie schooner — the ‘ covered wagon,’ as this generation knows it: here by the hundreds, loaded with stoves and chairs and babies and chickens, with now and then a pig; pushing in against the back of the racing line, without exactly knowing why.

In spite of what the moving pictures tell you, take it from me that while prairie schooners have housed many good and deserving people, they have housed more scalawags, and most often of all the wandering ne’er-do-well, the all-wise, know-nothing soldier of misfortune, the nomadic Western renter. Elsewhere, he is the sage of the corner grocery. He does better at wrestling with the tariff than at making a living for his wife and children. His farming is a joke. He moves along every year — broke, plus one more in the family. And he blames everything except the child upon the currency.

For months he has been camping all the way down from ‘Ioway’ or somewhere, to have, at last, a farm of his own in the Cherokee Strip. But now his cocksureness is wobbling; something in the figures lined up ahead dispels his dream of a home for the asking. His great lumbering schooner cannot make the run — this much penetrates. So he proceeds to ’onhitch’ his least-winded plough horse, and gets astride.

IV

A quarter to twelve. The line stiffened and became more quiet with the tension of waiting. Out in front a hundred yards, and twice as far apart, were soldiers, resting easily on their rifles, contemplating the line. I casually wondered how they would manage to dodge the onrush; perhaps that was what they themselves were thinking about.

The engine, a few hundred feet away, coughed gently at the starting line, while its tender, and the tops of its ten cattle cars trailing back into the State of Kansas, were alive with men. Inside the cars, the boomers were packed standing, with their arms sticking out where horns ought to be.

Just then, as we learned afterward, a few miles east of us somebody’s revolver was accidentally discharged. A middle-aged man on horseback, mistaking it for the starting gun, dashed at a gallop across the line.

‘Come back!’ yelled the crowd, in a wild, inarticulate roar; but the man imagined the pack at his heels.

‘Halt!’ commanded the soldier in front. No one could have heard him above the din.

That soldier did what he had a right to do: he shot the man through the head. Too bad that he did not think to shoot the horse.

Five minutes. Three minutes. The soldiers now stood with rifles pointed upward, waiting for the first sound of firing to come along their line from the east. A cannon at its eastern end was to give the first signal; this the rifles were to take up and carry on as fast as sound could travel the length of the Cherokee Strip.

All set!

At one minute to twelve o’clock my brother and I, noticing that the soldier out front was squinting upward along his rifle barrel and intent on the coming signal, slipped out fifty feet in front of the line, along the railroad embankment. It was the best possible place from which to view the start.

There were supposed to be somewhere around one hundred thousand men in line on the Kansas border. Within the two-mile range of vision from our point of vantage, there were at the least calculation five thousand, and probably nearer eight.

The waiting line, viewed from out front, was a breath-taking sight. The back of the line was ragged, incoherent; the front was even, smooth, solid. It looked like the line-up that it was. I thought I had realized the immensity of the spectacle; but that one minute out in front gave the unmatched thrill of an impending race with six thousand starters in sight.

First in the line was a solid bank of horses, — with riders, or hitched to gigs, buckboards, carts, wagons, — but to the eye there were two miles of tossing heads, and shiny chests, and restless front legs of horses. The medley of grotesque speed outfits, the stupendous gamble, the uniqueness and the farce and the tragedy of it — these faded before the acute expectancy of a horse race beyond words, incomparable.

While we stood, numb with looking, the rifles snapped, and the line broke with a huge, crackling roar. That one thundering moment of horseflesh by the mile quivering in its first leap forward was a gift of the gods, and its like will never come again. The next instant we were in a crash of vehicles whizzing past us. It was like trying to see a hundred three-ring circuses at once; and it was over while the mind was reaching for the start. But between the crack of the rifles and the dip of the last lumbering prairie schooner over the hills there was begun, made, and finished a chapter by itself in racing history.

Then we sat down on the little mound of made earth that had fended off the rush, and looked out at about half-a-dozen wrecks picking themselves up on the prairie.

With returning sanity came details of the run. The first to be remarked was the early trailing of the racers, well strung out from the start; and not all of those in the lead were horsemen. Some of the racing rigs were making good; fast horses were all right, so long as they could keep their feet. One man in a two-wheel spring cart was well up with the first horseback riders as they went over the hills; at every bounce he threatened to miss the seat on the come-back, but our last view showed him still hitting safe.

The funniest of all the starters was the engine, with her ten carloads of men. From our exclusive stand fifty feet directly in front of her, I happened to be contemplating the thing as the race’s chief absurdity when the rush began. The engine tooted incessantly and labored hard, but of course she could not get under way with anything like the quickness of the horses. The incongruity of starting a contrivance like that with a lot of horses and calling it a race made us laugh — not only at her waddling so ridiculously behind at the start, but because we knew that the crowd aboard intended to be way ahead of the horsemen long before the finish of the race, if moral suasion or cash inducement could make the old girl cough a little faster than the rules allowed.

Of course, everybody on the train was openly mad with excitement, without a chance to vent his emotion in any but some noise-making way. With the first toots of the engine came revolver shots from the crowds along the tops of the cars, and a few from those inside. The fusillade, keeping up all the while the train was pulling out past us, had a most exhilarating effect; my old gun, I suddenly noticed, was barking with the rest of them.

For any man who was a fair sprinter, the best chances of the run were aboard that train. It was to stop only at a few town sites, but one was not bound to take a town lot because he was on the train; he could run either way into the country and stake a farm, and be in competition only with those off the train. He would be limited to the farms within running distance of the town sites, but those, naturally, were the most valuable farms in the Cherokee Strip. That train carried into the Strip what might be termed a load of legally qualified sooners.

V

The last of all the freak conveyances to leave the border were a couple of bicycles. Leisurely we started south on the Texas stage trail that followed the general direction of the railway track. We wanted to get in as far as possible that night, camp on the prairie among the boomers, then go on to the town sites Sunday morning for a change of scenery.

Freight wagons were already on the road in an almost solid stream, carrying supplies to the boomers. It had never been more than a prairie trail, up to this twelve o’clock noon; now, surprised by the extraordinary traffic, it sank dejectedly into a couple of sandy ruts. Many of the wagons avoided it; so did we, and rode on the prairie, except where the horse paths inside the tracks had not been cut to a powder by too many heavy shoes.

Traveling over virgin prairie on bicycles is possible, but not to be lightly recommended as a pleasure trip. At a hundred in the shade in a shadeless country, and with a strong head wind just blown in from Texas, it might with reason be mildly discouraged. This was our sentiment, after having done twenty miles of it.

A country two hours old, with a boomer sitting on every square half mile, — or even three or four gentlemen sitting on the same quarter section, and regarding one another with disfavor, — still looks remarkably like untouched prairie. Three or four men to the half mile make a scanty population. The rush had gone by, and now — until darkness should set in — it was to be a case of suspended animation.

Some of these personal arguments probably were settled at once, on the spot, and in broad daylight; but the general understanding was that, in the case of several men on the same tract, the first night in the Strip was to determine which got there first. That first night was to be a tough one for tenderfeet.

Twice during the afternoon we sampled the cussedness of those riding ahead of us. These knights of the front line had fired the grass — nothing like a prairie fire in a strong head wind to take the courage out of boomers already dropping behind. On the upland prairie, where we happened to encounter these amiable gestures, the grass was thin. In thin grass a prairie fire runs slowly and has a way of creeping ahead of itself in spots, giving one a chance to step sideways across a bit of its line where there is no flame at all. We slipped through with no inconvenience, carrying our bicycles over the hot stretches of ground to save the tires. Men on not too timid horses could have picked the open spots as easily; but vehicles, especially prairie schooners and freight wagons, are not good at dodging sidewise, and horses refuse to jump through even such mild little tongues of flame as these were.

The freighters stuck to the beatendown trail, as offering a safe but narrow path through.

In the deep thick grass of the draws, prairie fires travel with a roaring heat at high speed. There were reports of these same fires catching prairie schooners in draws, consuming them, and badly burning the occupants. Fortunately the great drought had left few valleys sufficiently grass-grown to be dangerous.

Other reports had to do with sooners. Feeling ran high; and at least one sooner paid the penalty. Some boomers told of a deep ravine where they had found a man hanging to a tree. On his shirt was pinned a note: ‘TOO SOON.’

My younger brother had an experience with a particularly nervy sooner that afternoon. He had made the run for land on a sure-footed mustang; had run at the head of the line for ten miles, in an hour and ten minutes, to a section picked out before the opening. Arrived there, he found a sooner coolly standing beside a horse whose hair was not even damp.

My brother promptly told him that that horse had not traveled a foot since the opening. For answer, he found himself looking into the little round hole of the sooner’s rifle. He at once conceded the point, went on three miles farther, and staked a claim. At a time like that, the wrong end of a gun is the most convincing of arguments.

At six o’clock we were only twenty miles in; but that twenty miles loomed up like a day’s work. Inflating and mending tires had taken a good deal of time, since we had been riding on the sharp stubble left by the fires. Deflation, too, of our own energy by the rough prairie and a head wind had slowed us down to little better than a walk. Six miles ahead was Pond Creek, the first town site of any importance. We could make that in the morning.

So we picked a little dip in the land where there were no gopher holes, — rattlesnakes have a way of inviting themselves as guests into the gophers’ homes, — spread our blankets, and sat down to a hearty supper. But with the water it was different. A general inquiry for water since the middle of the afternoon had made everybody cautious in the use of the canteen, in spite of the heat.

After supper we strolled over to a little rise and had a view of the country. It was a fine stretch of prairie, slightly depressed, and for that reason more desirable than the upland. Perhaps that was why we noticed considerably more than one man to the half mile.

Very soon after sunset came darkness, and with it a multitude of stars. It was a blaze of light above, but pitchdark below; the brilliant starlight of an over-clear air seems to have little power to illuminate the earth.

But these matters did not interest us. Dog-tired, we rolled up in our blankets, rested our heads on our bicycle wheels, and dropped off to sleep.

A little before midnight, we woke up to a distant clatter of hoofs, shouting, and shooting.

‘Number — section — township — range — K-e-e-p o-f-f and g-e-t o-f-f! ’ Then crack! crack! went the rifles, after each call, from the pretty country we had been admiring at sundown.

The exercises had begun.

Evidently a gang on horseback were cleaning up a few quarter sections in the district for their own use. Once they swung around within a few rods of us, judging by the sound; but we could not see them, and it stands to reason that they did not see us, or we should have had callers.

The affair seems to have been no more than the time-honored business of ‘shootin’ past the ears.’ In those first nights and days of the merry life in the Cherokee Strip, a few wellplaced shots next to the organs of hearing started many a tenderfoot on the run for his home town back East.

After listening to the clean-up for a while, we fell asleep. Suddenly, at early daylight, a clatter of hoofs woke us again. Three horsemen had drawn up, and were looking at us. Then, ‘Whatcher doin’ here?’

This was where the gun came in handy. It enabled us to talk with more assurance. We told them the facts: we were not claiming this land, — did n’t care whose it was, — were just camping on it, and intended to stay there till after breakfast.

They were sensible men. They noted the gun, and the accent, then rode away. If they had ignored both, and had ordered us then and there to move on, we should have done so. In that case we should have been the sensible ones.

Since daybreak, boomers had been straggling northward, bound for Kansas and all points east. One young fellow who stopped for a moment while we were eating breakfast was a fair sample of the ‘headed-out’ crowd. He asked for water, and we gave him a biscuit. Our few drops were no more. He had staked a claim in our nice little valley, along with a half-dozen others on the same tract; and of course nobody under heaven could know who had arrived first. But for him the delicate question had been settled by the gay horsemen of the night before. By the time they were through with him, he felt assured that he must have arrived about a week late.

‘I would n’t live here next to such neighbors anyway,’ he told us with considerable heat. There was no need to tell him, since he had lost his claim, that if he had stayed he never would have had those men for neighbors. Farming in the Cherokee Strip was the last thing in the minds of any of these gun toters. Somebody would have to live on these claims for five years as homesteaders, but not they; their plan was to get possession, file on it, then sell their relinquishments to farmers.

It was to be the story of every move into the prairie frontier: first-crop settlers, mostly ‘fly-by-nights,’ then a second incoming of farmers. Always the huge economic waste of an almost complete resettling.

VI

Now we were off for the town sites. Inside of the first mile, our tires were hopelessly down. It was to be a walk and a push of six miles to Pond Creek. Same heat, same howling head wind. We had to lean our way against it at about two miles an hour.

The one weak spot in our equipment — in everybody’s equipment — was the size of the canteens. All of us might better have carried twice the weight and had twice as much water. Now, as the forenoon wore on, that dry breakfast and the heat were making an impression.

We were meeting boomers all the time now, headed out, with the usual story of several on a claim. By a lucky chance, we happened to spy a wagon with two barrels in it, half a mile off on the prairie. It was water — warm to the touch, but still water. The men said they had hauled it in from Slate Creek, Kansas.

We knew Slate Creek. It was all right to bathe in, if one could wash off afterward. But they gave us all we could drink, and our canteens full, for forty cents. A little farther on we came upon several men examining something in the bank of a little ravine. It was a drop-by-drop trickle of what had been a spring, and they were in line for the water. We tipped them off to the two barrels from Slate Creek.

The town site of Pond Creek had stopped only a small portion of the boomers riding on that cattle train. Most of them had preferred to seek their fortunes in Enid, twenty miles farther south, where the government had established its Land Office.

Pond Creek, less than a day old, was already admitting that it might turn out to be a small town. This was a most extraordinary concession. If any new frontier town, having the bare prospect of surviving as a post office, could not sell lots at least one mile out, its citizens were deemed lacking in the true spirit of progress.

But Pond Creek was growing, that Sunday morning, as fast as tents and board shacks could be put up on the newly acquired lots. Wagons and freight trains during the night had brought in lumber and building materials. The sound of the saw and hammer and plenty of shouting was in the air. Dust was already inches thick on the city streets, kicked up by horses and vehicles in from the surrounding country for water and supplies. Lunch counters across the open fronts of tents were passing out ham sandwiches and black coffee to crowds several deep. At one of these, as we stood waiting, someone announced, ‘Lady coming!’

Instantly a clear way was made to the counter — and here came the lady! A bedraggled, sand-biting creature like the rest of us; but in lonely state she ambled up, got her butterless bun and creamless coffee, and shuffled off again. There’s chivalry for you!

Under the railroad’s water tank a preacher of the exhorter type was delivering the town’s first sermon to a shifting handful, as boomers came and went around the friendly tap provided by the company. Down the track a group that passed as a dancing show gave the town its first suggestion of paint.

Men coming in from the upland claims told of horses dying for lack of water, and of men desperately short of it. Few had comprehended the meaning of a waterless country. One man told of getting his horses to town only by giving them spoonfuls of whiskey along the way. How those few whiffs could have spread cheer over the vast extent of a horse it is difficult to understand.

But, whatever else Pond Creek lacked in the way of social and other advantages, water was in abundance. We celebrated the profusion by washing our faces.

VII

Of course we had to see the Big Town, Enid, and share the excitement of the Land Office on its first business day, Monday. Pond Creek’s hectic Sunday was only a starter.

We shipped our crippled bicycles out on the train bound north. Their last service had been as pillows the night before, so low had they fallen from their proud estate; but it hardly seemed worth while to push them another twenty miles merely to rest our heads on the front wheels. Those spokes had an unpleasant way of raking one’s ear during the unconscious moments.

Enid was said to have a population of five thousand that Monday morning. The man who gave us this opinion admitted that the number was ‘varyin’ purty rapid.’ This looked reasonable, considering that it had varied from nothing to five thousand since Saturday.

The scenes and activities were much like those in Pond Creek, except that they were on a larger scale and the city was one day older, which made it twice as old as Pond Creek. This wide difference in ages was beginning to tell. Enid had a post office in a little tent, and a hotel in a big one — the Heywood, if I remember rightly. We had boiled beef and potatoes for dinner. This showed that culture was creeping in, and we might as well go back to Kansas.

Off on one of the town lots was a small safe, with a banner on it marked ‘THE TIMES.’ A newspaper office was being built around it. In a tent bearing a big canvas sign, ‘REAL ESTATE & LOANS,’ I found one of our discarded agents of the farm-mortgage days, from the extreme northwest of Nebraska. He was one of those men always in the vanguard of the chronic pioneers.

But the government Land Office was the centre of an activity all its own. Entrymen from all over the district were driving in to file their claims. There was a notion widely prevailing that the first to file on a disputed claim gained thereby an advantage. Soldiers held the men to a line, and the line extended off on the prairie for more than a mile — some said two miles. Those way out would be in line for twenty-four, thirty-six hours. There seemed to be no way to speed up the work in the office.

The great spectacle was over. The sordid business of fighting for titles was on.

We had got, richly, all that we came for. Hundreds of boomers, disillusioned, landless, now lined the track, waiting for a chance to get out of the Strip. In the wild scramble to get aboard the north-bound train that night my brother and I were among the winners — by a hair.

The last of the Prairie Frontiers!